Location addresses are often stored within a database for retrieval as needed. The format of these location addresses includes many inconsistencies that render the addresses difficult to maintain, organize and locate within the database. The United States Post Office has an address specification standard that lists acceptable formats for written addresses. Typically, in a database, addresses are simply entered as lines of text into designated fields of a database. For example, an address is often stored as three or four lines of text that may be retrieved in association with a key and used without further processing. Alternatively, an address may be broken down into many different elements, where each element is stored in association with a key. Upon retrieval, these elements can be formatted to regenerate the location address. Within the database, each address is typically associated with a person or an organization. For example, each element of the address may be stored as text within individual columns of a table that has an index field associated with the owning entity.
However, an address may be written in many different ways, especially where the address is written by different people. This variable nature of the data makes breaking the address down into individual fields more difficult, particularly where ordering of the individual fields may vary. Also, an address may contain abbreviations that vary depending upon the author of the address. For example, the street address “132 Main Street” may also be written as “132 Main St” or as “132 Main Str.” Thus, when searching for an address stored as simple text lines, unless the correct format and abbreviations are used, a match for an existing address may not be found.
Where addresses are stored in a database in association with an entity such as a person or organization, use of these addresses is also often limited by that association, for privacy or other concerns.
Address storage is known to experience many common problems. The various elements of an address may be inconsistently formatted, and word abbreviations may be inconsistent. An address may have invalid formatting that makes it incompatible with and/or incomprehensible to a machine. Such inconsistencies often result in inadvertent storage of duplicate addresses. Furthermore, typical address storage systems and methods have an inability to share a single address among multiple entities, and in contrast, also have difficulty storing multiple addresses for a single entity. Many systems and methods are further unable to handle multiple postal address format standards, which can vary by country. Additionally, there are multiple types of non-postal addresses that experience storage problems similar to those seen with postal addresses, such as voice phone numbers, fax phone numbers and e-mail addresses.